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Topic: Anyone have an old mac mini or macbook with intel chip they want to give me? (Read 6159 times)

gasp.. i know it's heresy but I was thinking of tinkering with some mac programming, just for the fun of it. a friend gave me an old mac laptop with broken keyboard but it turns out that you can't use recent mac development tools on mac's built using powerpc chips. hence the request for mac's with INTEL chips.

i already have keyboard, mouse, monitor.. so an old mac mini would be ideal.

if anyone has one just sitting in the closet (with an intel chip! -- usually core 2 duo), i would be very grateful for it.

I've had the same thoughts recently as I'm writing a mobile app and want to support Android and iPhones. Eventually I settled on Marmalade (then known as Airplay SDK) with which I can develop on Windows.

Before that though, and more relevant to what your talking anout, I did setup a Hackintosh in VirtualBox just to see what the Mac is like. It's something I would recommend before spending cash. Obviously the legality is dubious, but then it's not something you would ever use, it really is just to test the waters.

thanks for the offer argv, but i can probably install a vmware/virtualbox osx guest myself if i decide to go that way.. perhaps i should.. maybe spending $200 on a faster cpu to run a virtual machine is a smarter expenditure than $200 on a mac mini. are the virtual machine osx installs fast enough to be useable? i remember trying this a couple of years ago and concluding that the osx install on vmware was not fast enough to be really useable.

Mouser: My experience with VMs is that since the introduction of processor virtualization, things have improved greatly. I frequently use Windows XP as a VM in my mac (which is not a powerful machine, as macs tend not to be), and it runs well. It does however take a considerable amount of RAM, which may be a problem.

PS: I just remembered that a friend of mine used to have an XP machine always downloading stuff through uTorrent in the background while he used the mac, and he was able to do pretty much everything he wanted with it.

I never have had access to an OS copy to work with, however, with the advent of the VT-technologies things have gotten a lot better for VM's in general. I have heard of many useable implimentations of OSX on VMware ESXi, and Citrix has even claimed to have a valid working copy running on their XenDesktop desktop hypervisor which runs on XenServer. I have not heard of any good useable copies running on a type 2 hypervisor, however (or type 1, whichever it is that runs on the OS instead of AS the OS). I would think your best bet if you have a copy of OSX to install would be to download a test copy of VMware Workstation and load it on there. Because of their broader corporate support over VirtualBox, you are likely going to have better chances of it working well in VMware. Another piece to consider is Parallels Virtuosso. Parallels came to Windows from the Mac world, so they may be better poised to help with getting it properly installed and running in a virtual machine. Please note, however, since licensing issues exist that are suspect, they may not be WILLING to help you get it running.

Update - A Windows 7 dual boot with an original Snow Leopard disc (which can be ordered online) seems like a very viable solution. See this guide. Try and verify that your hardware will be compatible first of course.

I'd really recommend going the hackintosh route, you can buy leopard/lion legally so you're not pirating, sure you are breaking EULA but then running it in a VM also breaks the EULA. Just check out http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/ and the connected forums, if you have the compatible hardware them dual booting really is the best option. I've gone that route and it was fairly painless.